I mention Snowden’s middle name, because it has come out that the extradition papers the US filed with HK misidentified him as Edward James Snowden, which was proper grounds for refusing the request, thus enabling Snowden’s escape. Hmmm, they’re going after this guy for telling the world how the US government is violating its constitution and who knows how many other nations’ laws; and they can’t even get the extradition request right.

Spy-novelist Berenson suggests what would have been the adult response to the Snowden affair:

We have treated a whistle-blower like a traitor — and thus made him a traitor. Great job. Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial? Maybe he would have gone with President Vladimir V. Putin anyway, but at least he would have had another option. The secret keepers would have won too: a Congressional hearing would have been a small price to bring Mr. Snowden and those precious hard drives back to American soil.

Alas, truth is stranger than fiction—and often much less satisfying in the end; it’s beginning to appear that Mr. Snowden may be stuck in something closely approaching modern purgatory—the “transit area” of a 21st century Russian airport, or any airport, for that matter. We have it on no less an authority than Russia’s Alpha Male and former Chief Spook, Vladimir Putin, that Snowden is holed up “in the transit hall as a transit passenger.”

Vladimir Putin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Putin said Russia would not extradite Snowden to the US with whom Russia has no extradition treaty. He called US accusations against Russia “ravings and rubbish.” Putin, in so many words, wished Snowden godspeed: “Mr. Snowden is a free man. [Only a Russian czar could view Snowden’s being “free”—ever again.] The sooner he chooses his final destination the better it would be for us and for himself.”

Snowden may be there a long while according to extradition lawer Douglas McNabb, who conducted an online Q&A at the London Guardian website in which I participated on Wednesday afternoon. Shortly before McNabb went online, we learned that Ecuador had not issued refugee documents for Snowden as had widely been reported since he left HK.

“If he had the document he would be free to travel assuming the airline accepted it as a valid travel document, which most do,” McNabb said. “It is now being reported that Ecuador has not issued refugee travel documents for Snowden. If accurate, Snowden may be pulling an Assange but at a transit area in the airport with a hotel.”

McNabb noted that the US Supreme Court has ruled that even while breaking local laws federal agents may kidnap someone in another country and bring him back to stand trial in the US. The kidnapping is not grounds for having the charges dismissed.

The Guradian yesterday released a survey by Public Policy Polling which indicates that Ameircans may be more concerned about the National Security Agencies digital dragnet than polling results reported earlier suggest. PPP polls are generally reliable and target voters, which may explain some of the variations in attitudes. Of course different questions were being answered, too.

Two-thirds of the voters surveyed want NSA surveillance activities reviewed; 56 percent want greater congressional oversight. Sixty percent want the government to open up about its data collection programs to understand what’s going on; 61 percent welcome fresh debate about the balance between security and privacy.

PPP also found a major (58%) concern about the role of private contractors’ access to state secrets. Voters are pretty evenly split on whether they approve of the government’s collection of their personal phone and internet data.

Clearly, Mr. Snowden has stirred the pot. The Guardian reported:

The poll suggests that his stated ambition has, at least for now, been achieved: some 90% of those surveyed said they had heard about the recent news involving the NSA’s collecting and storing of Verizon phone records and gaining access to data from major internet companies…

Other reports, in the Guardian and elsewhere, show Snowden playing a skillful yet very dangerous game. Some have questioned his choice of Hong Kong to make his stand. He seems to have the US government in a Catch 22: If he is charged and extradited, Hong Kong police must arrest him, seize his files and computers; and hand them over to the Chinese government, which the US may want to avoid.

If the Brits were to get involved, it would make one heck of an MI5 episode! But it looks like the Brits do definitely not want to be involved. The Home Office has alerted the world’s airlines that Mr. Snowden is persona non grata; dropping him on British soil will cost—£2,000 + cost of housing and/or disposing of Snowden. The Brits don’t want to become entangled in another secret documents leak scandal. Last year, facing extradition to Sweden WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was granted political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London,

Those words concluded Ed Snowden’s interview with the Guardian after he disclosed the National Security Agency’s communications dragnet:

The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They’ll know at length that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.

In the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only gonna get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change,. . .a new leader will be elected; they’ll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the danger we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat: “We need more authority. We need more power.” And there’ll be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. It’ll be turnkey tyranny.

Those last two words rang a bell. Last week, when the story broke, I was more outraged than surprised; I knew there was something familiar about Snowden’s revelations. In March, 2012, I read an article in Wired magazine about the Utah Data Center then being completed at Bluffdale, south of Salt Lake City. The article revealed in detail not only the functions of the data center but also a lot about the NSA surveillance programs it would facilitate, the programs about which Snowden has sounded an alarm:

The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Later in the story:

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Daniel Ellsberg, whom I mentioned in my previous post, has spoken up, calling Snowden’s revelations the most significant disclosure in the nation’s history:

I was overjoyed that finally an official with high or a former official with high access, good knowledge of the abusive system that he was revealing was ready to tell the truth at whatever cost to his own future safety, or his career, ready to give up his career, risk even prison to inform the American people.

What he was looking at and what he told us about was the form of behavior, the practice of policy that’s blatantly unconstitutional. I respect his judgment of having withheld most of what he knows, as an information specialist, on the grounds that its secrecy is legitimate and that the benefit to the American people of knowing it would be outweighed by possible dangers. What he has chosen, on the other hand, to put out, again confirms very good judgment. …There has been no more significant disclosure in the history of our country. And I’ll include the Pentagon Papers in that. . . .

I fear for our rights. I fear for our democracy, and I think others should too. And I don’t think, actually, that we are governed by people in Congress, the courts or the White House who have sufficient concern for the requirements of maintaining a democracy.

I am really glad the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit to stop these blatantly unconstitutional programs. However, I fear that Ellsberg’s assessment is true; Congress and the White House have created a monster that is raging out of control. Can they rein it in? Can, will We (the People)?

It is not looking good: CBS has just released a poll showing that 46 percent of Americans think the government has struck the right balance between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberties, 36 percent say the NSA has overreached, and 13 percent say the government has not gon far enough. This, my friends, is disturbing news.

A few days ago, when the Guardian and the Post first released the information about national “security” administration spying on citizens’ communications, I raised concerns on Facebook:

Be careful whom you connect with on your “smart” phone. Speak with the “wrong” person, and you might want to beware of a drone overhead. Apparently, it is now lawful for the national “security” agency not only to spy on Americans’ communications but also to, without a trial, carry out drone assassination of citizens who communicate with the “wrong” people! How is this even vaguely constitutional? The constitutional scholar in the White House has totally lost his bearings. The “intelligence” agencies appear to be running the country.

Last night, I added a link to Ed Snowden’s on-camera interview along with the following comments:

Following up on the concerns I expressed a couple posts ago, here’s an interview with Ed Snowden, the man who blew the whistle on the secret federal programs, like PRISM, spying on US citizen communications.

“You don’t have to have done something wrong; you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. Then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone into the context of a wrongdoer.”

“If you realize that that’s the world you helped create; and it’s gonna get worse, with the next generation ’n’ the next generation, to extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk.”

Mr. Snowden echoes my main concern: A government that secretly monitors its citizens, secretly amasses information and builds a secret, supposedly “compelling” case against and then restrains, assassinates or executes even a single citizen without conviction at trial is a potential danger to any citizen.

This man has great courage; he will go down as a hero and/or martyr if a nation of free citizens survives this era. Daniel Ellsberg comes to mind, whose release of the Pentagon papers exposed the fraud behind the Vietnam war. I suspect this young man will have a much tougher time; the “intelligence” community has become much more powerful now.

Soon, I’ll figure out how to properly link my Facebook page to these posts. There have already been several perceptive comments there.